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Base price: $19.
1 – 4 players.
Play time: 15 – 30 minutes.
BGG Link
Check it out on Kickstarter!
Logged plays: 2
Full disclosure: A preview copy of Cascadia: Rolling Hills was provided by Flatout Games. Some art, gameplay, or other aspects of the game may change between this preview and the fulfillment of the Kickstarter, should it fund, as this is a preview of a currently unreleased game.
Back with another Cascadia in time for the Kickstarter! I covered Rolling Rivers last week, so I’m excited to tell you about its sister game, Rolling Hills! I’ll hopefully get to try the expansion pretty soon for the base game, so, lots of Cascadia in the present and in the future. This makes sense, as I, too, live in the Pacific Northwest, now. But let’s see how the hills are faring!
In Cascadia: Rolling Hills, you’ve left the waterways behind for a more elevated experience. They’re not necessarily mountains, but you’ll find the hills are alive with a lot of things to offer you. Still the same animals: the classics, though. Bears, elk, foxes, hawks, and salmon. Do you even need any others? So roll, write, and plan out your perfect ecosystem against the backdrop of the Pacific Northwest’s least flat ground. Can these hills take you higher?
Contents
Player Count Differences
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Again, not many here, just like Rolling Rivers. Most of the interaction at play isn’t around interacting with other players; you’re more working on high-scoring combos where you can earn tons of points from different animal combinations. As the boards get more complicated, you might find that you want to lower the player count a bit or limit to experienced players, just because one player taking a while can slow the entire game down pretty drastically. Otherwise, though, you can’t mess with or add anything to anyone else’s boards, so there’s pretty much no external player interaction. That’s kind of great for me, though, so I’m here for it.
Strategy
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- There are a few ways to mitigate rough dice rolls in this one, so try to use those to your advantage. Generally, it can be good to try and get as much as you can on rolls, but you can’t always roll well (or maybe you can?). When you get opportunities to mitigate bad rolls (such as taking the three dice instead of all of one type), try to cover your bases or fill out what’s missing.
- Like Rolling Rivers, combos are going to be your friend. You just want to place animals or cross off tiles so you can potentially earn additional animals or tiles or bonuses; the more you check off, the more you get, and the more you can place.
- On Board D, don’t wait too long to start completing regions, even if you miss out on the bonus for filling them with wildlife of the same type. You’ll get more animals that way. In my last game on D I spent a while trying to get the perfect animals in the right spots for various regions, and I wasted a lot of time trying to get “perfect” placement when really, I could have just taken the animals as I got them and probably filled out more regions overall.
- On Board C, going deep can help you more productively go wide later (since you’ll have access to more of the board). There are two sets of tiles for each region, so if you go deep in certain regions, you’ll be able to start with access to the other part of the region potentially before you need to fill out the first part.
- Boards A and B are pretty similar to Rolling Rivers, with some things switched around. Similar strategies will apply there. It’s nice to have some consistency.
Pros, Mehs, and Cons
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Pros
- Oh, these dice have a bit better luck mitigation. There are two special dice faces: one lets you reroll your personal dice up to twice, and the other lets you choose three dice to keep rather than all dice of one type. When you have particularly bad turns in Rolling Rivers, you might be able to keep two animals, tops; this usually lets you pop three onto your board, which is significantly better (and less frustrating).
- I really like (and, consequently, hate) the Discount Card that lets you bet on rolling the right animal type. It’s so fun to bet big and roll and then completely miss the mark. It’s kind of the dream. That said, when it works out, it feels great and it’s excellent and you can’t help but cheer even if it happens to your opponent.
- I think the D board here is less complicated than but just as interesting as the D board in Rolling Rivers. Just a little less complicated, though, since you’re trying to fill out various hexes with the same animal type rather than trying to make specific arrangements of the various animals.
- I really like how these sets mix and match together. You can use dice across both sets or boards or cards, which is pretty cool.
- I’m excited to see how easy it’ll be to teach Cascadia to my friends after they’ve played both of these. There’s a lot of good analogues between the roll-and-write games and Cascadia proper, so I’m wondering if it’ll be easier to teach the core game now that we’ve dug into the roll-and-writes a few more times.
- Pretty good box size! Decently portable. I do love the box quality, as well, but it’s a nice size and it’s very easy to take this and a few other boxes around in my backpack.
- I really thought the tally sheet was going to be harder to teach and use than it ended up being. It’s a surprisingly useful way to track your “inventory” across turns without things getting too complicated.
Mehs
- If you’ve got a low tolerance for luck in your games, there are a few Completion Cards here that you might want to avoid. There are several that let you either roll dice for a bonus or potentially roll dice to lower requirements, which introduce a lot of luck into your roll-and-write experience. That said, if you’re that upset about luck, just wait until you find out you and your opponents roll two different personal dice each round. It’s hard to get too frustrated about luck in a roll-and-write.
Cons
- I’m growing increasingly skeptical of the 15 – 30m claim for games with the D board. They always take me about an hour for my group. There’s a lot to do, a lot of combos to dig into, and a lot of things to weigh and try! So I’m less than convinced by the claim on the box, I suppose.
Overall: 8.75 / 10
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Overall, I like Cascadia: Rolling Hills a lot! Both games are pretty refreshingly simple roll-and-write games that include a fantastic ramp-up in complexity between the A and D boards. A is a snack and D is a full meal, as the kids say, probably. I really like seeing that in games, as it indicates an understanding of their players and a desire for approachability in a medium that’s constantly demanding more and more and more. More content, more complexity, and more weight to be a “better” game. Granted, one could make the counterpoint that this game already includes four different boards with their own points along the complexity curve, but I appreciate that the boards are designed to be distinct points along the complexity gradient, rather than a just straight-out-of-the-box multi-hour game. That’s a personal preference, granted, but I still think Cascadia: Rolling, as a series, does another great job of showcasing the great work coming out of the Flatout cooperative. Solid gameplay, excellent art, fantastic graphic design, and a great mix of approachability and complexity. I still don’t entirely believe you can get through a game on the D board in 30 minutes, but what do I know? I’ll be interested to see if there are other games in the Rolling series; I’d certainly be glad to see them. If you’re looking for another great roll-and-write, you love the landscape of the Pacific Northwest, or you just (wisely) enjoy everything Flatout puts out, I’d definitely recommend checking out Cascadia: Rolling Hills! It’s definitely worthy of the Cascadia title.
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